I sipped the medicine. A greasy, dark milk. “Where are your children?”
“Laid to rest in a church plot back in Ladysmith.”
“Jesus. How long have I been out?”
“Two and one-half days.”
My face blanked. “And your children? Gone and buried in that time?”
The woman returned to husking corn. She dropped a fresh ear into a cauldron of boiling water on top of her mud stove. Her voice was impassive but kind. “My children died long ago.”
“I saw them. Two little fair-haired ones. On your stoop. A boy and a girl.”
“You were hallucinating.”
I sat down my bowl.
“Are you hungry?”
“I could eat like all wrath.”
She dropped two more ears into the scald. “Making corn soup.”
“I wouldn’t mind getting corned, myself.”
The woman scoffed. “I don’t have any trim for quaffing.”
“I’m not particular miss . . . ?”
“Rutts. My family name is Rutts.”
I struggled on a smile. “I’m Fritz Bebout.”
“If you say so. I’ve a little antifogmatic in the cupboard,” Rutts said and, with great aching effort, rose again to pour me a dop of white alcohol from an oviform bottle stoppered with a cob. I accepted the clay mug with two hands and thanked her mightily. The liquor was as strong as moonshine with the lethal taste of sorghum and sourwood.
“Have you a smoke?” I asked.
“I haven’t.”
“A chaw of turbaccur, maybe?”
Rutts nodded and procured a pouch of goldflake from somewhere deep in her apron. I scooted over to the edge of the bed, and together we sat dipping the leaves and spitting juice onto the fragrant roasting logs in her stove.
I put my wrapped leg up on one of the corn pails. “Probably a mamba, right?”
“You’d been dead if it were a mamba. A boomslang it was most probably.”
“You saved my life,” I said.
“I’ll queue you up a bath for your leg. It needs soaking,” Rutts replied and made business scooting herself into a backroom to heat the bath before dinner. The tub was a giant copper vessel large enough to hold three men, and the water was heated underneath by a cairn of hot rocks. I tested the temperature. Hot enough to cook my skin right off the bone. I managed my ankle and calf into the boil in order to soak my wound but couldn’t tolerate the heat for more than a few seconds.
Come nightfall we ate supper sitting before the mud stove. I slopped up corn soup and cowpeas from a biscuit tin with a bent spoon. I ate three bowls and tore into some rocky bread for dipping and indulged in another chaw of goldflake afterward and sipped more fog while the rain swooped music against the thatch roof. Old woman Rutts broke the silence by asking, “What’s your real name? You surely aren’t any Fritz Bebout.”
I was in no state to draw up memory, and I said as much.
“You owe me at least your name.”
“I owe you more than that. My name’s Pat Crowe.”
“An Irish lad, then?”
“American,” I said. My head swarmed from the mug of fog. “I suppose you could say I haven’t any home, though, really.”
“Everyone has a home. Even those who’ve abandoned it,” Rutts said and rose from her cane chair for her bedroom without saying another word.
In the morning she drew another bath for me, this one much cooler. I soaked my whole body and got the crust off my skin with a currycomb. A cross breeze blew in through a pair of open windows. While drying myself with a ratty towel, two separate voices and the faint clatter of hooves echoed outside. I scanned the landscape through a window, my feet still in the bath. Two British soldiers on horseback approached through a wide aisle in the purple corn. They donned green tunics and khaki helmets and rode their horses at a walk. A pair of Waler ponies by the look of them. Hearty creatures shipped in from Australia. Horses bred for war that could trek nearly as much ground without water as camels. The English never cultivated anything on their own merit. Not even their goddamn horses. Everything was seized, claimed, or imported. I peeked my head out of the bathroom door.
“Got a pair of scouts out there in your corn,” I said in an urgent whisper.
Rutts sat unalarmed by the stove. “I know. They’re early.”
“Early? You’re expecting them?”
“They’ve come for reparations.”
“How’s that?”
“I give them food and drink and a place to bunk for the night and whatever else they want. In turn, they don’t burn down my barn or my crops.”
“Whatever else they want?”
“Sometimes if they get drunk enough it comes to that.”
“That’s some arrangement.”
“Reason how my farm is one of the few still left standing.”
I came out of the washroom holding my towel around my waist. “Fetch me my clothes and revolver.”
“Best not. Best to stay hidden if I were you.”
I grabbed my pearl-handled pistol and bandolier belt off a knob by the front door and hurried about for my clothes.
“Your laundry is on the boil,” Rutts said and nodded at the pot of water cooking my tattered shirt and pants. I stammered and fussed and checked the cylinder of my revolver to make sure it was loaded. Hoof beats circled outside the farmhouse. There was no time to react as the riders came calling. I climbed naked out of the washroom window with my revolver in hand and scampered into the tall purple corn. I crawled through the stalks to the other side of the house in order to get a vantage point. Knelt down in the dirt and waited. I could see the backs of the soldiers up on their horses still. They sat on their ponies a few feet in front of the farmhouse discussing payment with the old woman.
I strained to hear.
“Hellu, Maggie,” one of the riders said in greeting. “We’ve come for our due and proper.”
“You’re a week early,” Rutts replied from the doorway.
“Are we now? Say, I suppose we might be.”
“Suppose you’ll have to indulge us anyhow,” the other rider said.
“I haven’t much for giving. A little milk. Some corn. I’m plumb out of liquor and bread and potatoes.”
“Oh, come now, old girl. Surely you can do better than that. Unless maybe you’d like to take a ride with us back to Pinewood.”
The second rider added, “And this is such a nice farm. Shame to have to torch her.”
I swelled with raw ire. A deep guttural hatred so awkward and unknowable that it was nearly ancestral in my bones and my throat. I felt it neither in my head nor my heart. Rather it was inside my follicles, in my pores. An emotion so ancient, so somatic, I could not help myself. I bolted out of the corn as naked as I’d entered it. I held my pearl pistol behind my back, clasped against my buttocks with both hands.
I smiled like a lunatic and called out to the pair of soldiers from a safe distance of about thirty yards. “Either one of you nancies be able to spare me a change of clothes?”
The soldiers turned in their saddles. The fatter of the two, a piggish man with a lampshade mustache, was chewing on his helmet string like a toddler. The second man tugged on his lead rope to turn his horse around fully and set his rifle across his lap. Neither man could quite believe his eyes.
“Criminy, George,” the second man said to the first. His cigar nearly fell out of his mouth. “He’s butt naked.”
I stepped forward. “Nothing gets past you, friend.”
“Sir, you do know your John Thomas is dangling in the free wind?”
I considered my own genitals and cocked the pistol hammer behind my back. “You got a keen eye. Attention to the obvious. I like that in a man.”
The soldiers sat staring. Saddle leather squeaked under their weigh
t. They could not stop staring, and I could not stop smiling.
“You boys fancy a little uphill gardening?” I asked. Judging by the blank expressions on their faces, my homosexual allusion had escaped them. A moment passed, and I stepped closer again. Twenty yards between us now. “Gets lonely out here on the veld, don’t it?”
“Maybe he’s one of those escaped from Barberton last month,” the first man said.
“Barberton?” I asked and paused as if drawing up a thought. “Oh yes. I heard of that place. That’s the prison camp where you keep all the fellas naked, right? A little slap and tickle at Her Majesty’s pleasure? I heard it told the queen’s army has been going a little against clocks up in those parts, if you know what I mean.”
The second soldier steadied his rifle but was still too confused to aim the barrel. He looked at his partner like he’d been struck over the head. “This bloke’s off his onion.”
“What the devil are you doing out here without any clothes on?” the other asked.
“Looking for a good time,” I said. “Looks like I found one.”
“He’s crazier’n hell.”
The man with the rifle finally put it to sights. “Off with you, you crazy bastard.”
I took little heart in the threat. “I’ll give you a half crown for your coat and drawers.”
“And where would you be keeping such a coin? Two inches deep in your own arse?”
Both of the soldiers laughed at that.
I said, “Now that’s not very nice. Not very nice at all. Seems basic manners were little taught to you boys.”
“You hardly need manners when you’re the one holding the gun,” the second man with the rifle said and put a boot heel into his horse’s flank to approach.
“Well, I can’t argue with that logic,” I said, whipped out my pistol from behind my back, and shot the encroaching soldier clean through his neck. His artery ruptured, and he clasped both hands over his throat as it jetted blood. I’d never seen that much blood come out of a man that quickly. Before he even had time to fall off his horse, I fired two more shots squarely into the other soldier’s chest and watched him drop from his saddle in a bundle. His horse took off at a full gallop like a shot out of a gate stall and drug his body around in the mud, his foot still caught in the stirrup.
It was a hell of a time corralling the two war horses into Miss Rutts’s paddock and even sillier than it was difficult on account I was still naked as I tried to coax the horses with nothing more than a switch. Rutts watched me dance around in circles trying to calm and steer the ponies. I looked back at her now and then. She was smiling widely. Watching me hop around naked as a jaybird fooling with those damn horses must’ve brought her more amusement than she’d had doing anything else in many years. Maybe ever.
The foolishness went on for the better part of an hour before I could manage both horses past the gate and lock them up. Next came the task of lugging the two bodies nearly a hundred yards to the other side of the farmhouse. I stripped each man of his clothing before I pulled them one at a time by their legs over the stone well. I stood panting and heaving for a long while and drank from the well bucket before finally dressing myself in the uniform of the slimmer soldier. I donned his pants, boots, green tunic, and even his khaki helmet. Everything except the man’s skivvies and socks. The pants didn’t fit at all. They sagged off my hips like I’d cinched on a potato sack. When I finally came back to the house it was well into the morning.
“Believe I’ll need me another bath before the day’s out,” I said to Rutts when I stomped into the small kitchen. She smiled and smiled from her chair at the table.
“Did you enjoy that show?” I asked.
Rutts blushed and studied her feet.
“That real fat one I pegged in the throat? God. He must’ve been one surprised sonofabitch to have gotten shot by a fella in the buff.”
“He must’ve been, yes,” Rutts said.
I took off my new helmet. “Well, that sorry pair won’t be harassing you anymore.”
“If not them, it’ll be someone else. On and on it’ll go.”
I tossed the cloth purse I’d lifted off one of the dead soldiers on the table. It was full of shillings and British gold. “You might be able to get some relief with that coin there. I’d maybe find a nice place to stash it under your floorboards.”
“I’d rather go hungry for torture than make use of that currency.”
“One kind of coin buys milk the same as any other.”
“It’d put my soul at hazard.”
I seized up a chair. Kicked my bare feet on the lip of the mud stove after taking off my new riding boots. I’d found a clay pipe in the belongings of one of the soldiers and set about to having a smoke. “I sure do get a kick out of you, missus. A real kick. And, well, just between you and me and the gatepost, you go ahead and do what you want with that coin. But don’t say I never left you anything.”
Rutts noted my improved disposition. “You’re in a fine fettle.”
“Turned out to be a pretty good day after all.”
“So you’ll be leaving off, then?”
I wheezed on my new pipe like an asthmatic. “Come first light tomorrow. Got to get those bodies and horses off your property. If some other troops come snooping around, well, you know what that means better than I do.”
“And after that?”
“After that?” I chewed on the thought. The pipe made me dizzy and reflective. “Well, after that I’m going to make port dressed up as a wounded British soldier in my new duds. Bullet wound in my back will come in handy for that. I’ll sail up to London and then back to New York. Next I’ll have me a drink of good old-fashioned American brandy, eat two or three platters of oysters on ice, hire up a whore that suits me as good as did my first horse. Maybe one with strawberry curls and some chunk to her. But, first things first. I got two new rifles, fifty pounds of ammunition, a horse to sell and one to ride. There’ll be couple of graves to dig when I get enough distance between me and your homestead. That and one helluva long boat ride. But I tell you what, I can taste that brandy and them oysters already. I can smell the lavender in that whore’s hair. Strong as pollen, I can smell it now.”
XI
WHAT THE DAY had melted, night froze again. Come the bluing of dawn, icicles as long as stalactites hung from the courthouse eaves. I rolled over on my jailhouse cot. It took me a moment to realize someone was standing at my cell door. A man dressed in a plaid suit and sheepskin coat held a long garment bag hooked over his shoulder by a single finger. The man kicked the bars of my cell after considering his timepiece. He dropped it back into his vest pocket with a labored sigh. I blinked myself awake, sat up in a torpor state. My hair as wild as cockscomb. I rubbed my tongue all over my mouth. My teeth felt like they were growing fur.
With clear eyes I looked again at the man standing before my cell bars.
Tom Dennison.
A pall of smoke around his head. Hazy as a nebula. He smoked a gold cigarette in an ivory holder. Wore fine doeskin gloves.
“Good morning, kitten,” he said and tossed me a beautiful golden banana between the bars. “I brought you breakfast.”
I nearly fumbled the fruit. Looked at it in my open palms like an artifact. “Didn’t you read the sign?”
Dennison balked. “And justice for all?”
“Don’t feed the animals,” I said, stripped the banana, and masticated half of it in two huge bites like I was being clocked by a timer.
“This cold is ungodly. I do hope you’re keeping warm in here.”
I scarfed the rest of the banana, smacked my lips like chewing library paste. I gestured at the privy in the corner of my cell. “My toilet water froze overnight. Can you believe that?”
“I can believe almost anything when it comes to you, Patrick.”
“Froze like pond ice. God
damnest thing,” I said and pitched the peel into the toilet where, sure enough, it landed on ice without sinking. “You got another nanner on you?”
“I’ve something better,” Dennison said and unzipped the garment bag. “A cheviot suit. Hand-tailored to your measurements. Tan with pink stripes. Ain’t it something?”
“That’s swell of you. Just what every jailbird needs,” I said, my cheeks still bulging with banana, and pinched my own black and white prison stripes. “A good striped suit.”
“You’re not a jailbird anymore. I’m springing you.”
“You tell the guards that on your way up?”
Dennison closed the garment bag. “I posted your bail. We’ve something to discuss.”
“My bail? That’s seven thousand dollars.”
“What’re friends for?”
I lay back down. “Well, they shore ain’t for floating seven large. That’s what banks and loan sharks are for. And you. Whatever you are.”
“You’re in no spot to be refusing charity,” a new voice called out from the down the hall.
I stood and went to my bars and rested my hands between the slats. My attorney hobbled over with a limp, clutching his briefcase against his chest with both arms as if it were a source of heat, chattering and cursing the cold.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked.
Ritchie said, “There’s not much time to discuss. I invited Tom here. He’s here to help. We have an ace in the hole, and it’s time to play the card.”
I took out a smuggled cheroot from my prison waistband and set fire to the clipped cigar with my last match. I rasped the bars with my knuckles. “I’m not going anywhere with this clown,” I said and gestured at Dennison. “Being in his debt is like being in the grave.”
Dennison smiled. “I’d be in your debt, actually, as it is.”
I didn’t take the bait. “I see, said the blind man to the deaf dog.”
“You need to trust me,” Ritchie said.
My eyelids were still heavy with sleep. My words sluggish, like talking in a dream. “Trust you? Trusting you this far is what’s going to get me a life sentence in Joliet. Goddamn you. I thought you was a sorcerer, not a lawyer. That’s what they call you, isn’t it? The sorcerer in the purple suit?”
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